Mason Williams Hasn’t Run Out of Gas Yet : Pop music: ‘A Gift of Song,’ his typically eclectic Christmas album, includes a ‘Classical Gas’-like rendition of ‘What Child Is This?’

Talk about hyphenates! Forget the old familiar combinations of writer-director, actor-producer and singer-songwriter.

Mason Williams--he of “Classical Gas” fame--has them all beat, with a line of credits that reads guitarist-songwriter-author-photographer-artist-TV comedy writer. Not bad for a former folkie from Abilene, Tex.

Williams’ current project is a typically eclectic Christmas album on a small independent label, Sausolito-based Real Music Records. Titled “A Gift of Song,” the album contains eight originals, including the whimsical, music-box sounding “Mistletoe Moustache,” and six traditional carols, including a “Classical Gas”-like rendering of “What Child Is This?”

“One of the things I realized about Christmas music,” said the 54-year-old entertainment business veteran during an interview in his North Hollywood apartment, “is that it’s not unlike ‘Classical Gas’ in that it’s a pop form of classical music. When they listen to Christmas carols, people submit themselves to a sort of madrigal style, English classical music. So it fits in very well with what I play, and with what the public image is of my music.”

A firm believer in careful preparation, Williams studied a number of Christmas source books before he began the recording, and came up with some startling information.

“ ‘Greensleeves,’ which we don’t do on the album, is actually taken from a bawdy folk song about prostitutes during the Crusades,” Williams explained. “It seems these women were called ‘Greensleeves’ because of the grass stains they got on their clothing while following their trade.”

And “Mistletoe Moustache” was inspired by the ancient Druidic reverence for the plant as a symbol of peace and good will, despite its poisonous qualities.

“The Druids were responsible for the practice of kissing under the mistletoe,” he said. “Mistletoe never touches the Earth, so they regarded it as a pure spirit.”

Williams has not been highly visible in the entertainment scene since his second go-round with the Smothers Brothers television shows in 1988. (He worked as a musician and a writer on the 1968-69 series, as well as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in 1980.)

Much of his time, recently, has been spent in his Oregon home preparing a variety of programs--”Bluegrassical Gas” and “Of Time and Rivers Flowing” among them--for his concert appearances.

The music industry, he feels, has changed dramatically in the last 20 years.

“One of the biggest differences between doing the Smothers Brothers shows in 1968 and 1988,” said Williams, “was that, in ‘88, the networks were adamant about keeping music down. They said, ‘Please don’t sing too many songs.’ Their demographics, they said, showed that whenever anyone plays or sings anything--whether it’s Michael Jackson or Andy Williams--four-fifths of the audience will tune out because they don’t like rock, or jazz, or country, or whatever. So, in order to service the broadest group of viewers, they avoid featuring music.

“We did 15 of those shows, and Dick Smothers didn’t sing a single song, and he used to sing one in every show in ’68. I thought it was ironic that the networks seemed to feel audiences would sit still for conversations, but that they’d tune out in droves as soon as somebody started to play their music.”

To “keep his sanity,” Williams maintains a constant string of alternate activities. At the moment, they include compiling a book of classical guitar pieces and an album of his earlier recordings, and a regular schedule of concerts, often with symphony orchestras.

He is particularly pleased to have finally created a Christmas album--one which he hopes will be reissued from year to year. “I love the community aspect of the season--the sense of sharing this music that everyone knows so well.”

But Williams has been around too long to have any grandiose illusions about his role in the business.

“As you get older,” he said, “you’re not on the cutting edge. But ‘cutting edge’ is a weird concept. There really are no such things as 1947 bluebirds or 1956 sunsets, and there really are no such things as the ‘ ‘50s’ or the ‘ ‘60s.’ It’s just a kind of way for commerce to attach itself to your life experiences.

“I’m trying to learn to think of myself from a broader perspective,” Williams said. “So, instead of saying, ‘I wrote poetry in the ‘60s,’ I try to say, ‘I wrote poetry as a young man.’ That way, instead of tying myself to a particular decade, I’m tying myself to all the young men throughout history who wrote poetry. It’s kind of a nice connection.”